Sticky Notes
by dicAcielcunobiryxoeD
Summary: What happens when a student's path in History is crossed with that of a giant pile of homework? Yes. The student's mind starts to wander, far, far, away...


A Short Story of the Traveling Mind

I am currently flipping back and forth the light blue pile of sticky notes, the kind that are glued together in such a way that the sides glued are alternating and are opposite each other. It is easy to flip between these fluttery little flat blue wings. Just open the pile a little bit, but so that the pile itself is sideways, and hold the very bottom pieces of the sticky notes: right side with the right hand, and the left side of the pile with your left. Then lift up the left or right side of the pile of sticky notes, alternatively, up in the air, so they automatically flip back and forth between the two sides of the pile. I keep doing this, over and over again so it forms a quiet fluttery rhythm.

I do not really want to do homework. The pile of it is sitting right beside the huge Algebra textbook on the desk. The thing is, whenever I think of homework, my mind starts to wander. This time it reflected off the pile of homework, bounced off the fat textbook, smugly staring at me with its glossy, square root-ey eyes, and fluttered through the ever moving Post – its in my hands. It sank right through the poster I made for the history project last year, which was hanging over there on the opposite side of the dimly lit room, and then my tired stare choo – chooed off into space.

Then my mind does something it never did before.

All the knowledge I had accumulated over the years started to form a linear pattern, one that was dotted with light blue sparkles, each one representing a point in time, each one a piece of history.

I close my eyes and embrace the graph my mind plotted out.

First point.

I see the sticky notes, fluttering back and forth, reminding me of a silent cartoon animation of a mad teacher trying to fix a photocopier, which suddenly starts spitting out papers, one after the other, forming a fan of these papers, which land neatly on the teacher's hands. The teacher then rushes to class.

Second point.

I see a history class, the teacher click – clacking down the hall as the roaring classroom behind the door hears and becomes deadly quiet. The teacher comes into the classroom, and hands out the notes for the PowerPoint, telling the students to fill out the blanks in the notes as she logs on to the computer. The PowerPoint comes on, and the un – studious students of the last class of the day begin writing, without listening to the wonderful, chilling, and beautiful tale the teacher tells to accompany the slide show. The saga today is of the American Revolution and the events leading up to it.

Fourth point.

As the students glance repeatedly at the clock (Well, you can't help it, it is last class on a Friday afternoon before the spring break), the teacher's tale forms a pattern, showing the way History usually repeats itself. The protagonists of the story first protest the British tea, after the tax on it was removed to encourage colonists to buy the tea. The colonists get angry because the colonial merchants still have to charge the tax for the tea they sell, leaving them out of the tea trade. The Boston Tea Party happens, where the colonists dress as Indians and dump the tea from the ship over into Boston Harbor. The Boston Harbor is promptly shut down by Britain, not to be reopened until later on. In another scene, the colonists are protesting the Stamp Act, now because a tax was added to the items the colonists buy. The Stamp Act gets semi – quietly repealed after the furious colonists terrorize the tax collectors, forcing them into hiding.

It is not that the colonists are whiny; they just want their way – a representation in the higher power, the Parliament, which imposes the laws on them. It is human nature to wish to be an active part of the major events that surround people. But the point my mind makes on the graph goes on to say that History often repeats itself (the colonists' protests), but interestingly enough, when it does, both the causes and the outcome of the repeated action are different each time. The first cause is the removal of a tax, leading to the shut down of the Boston Harbor, but the second is the addition of a tax, leading to the tax never being collected, but not resulting in a major direct punishment. The action, though, is the same – colonists protest both tax changes imposed on them by Britain.

The bell rings and my mind exits the imaginary history classroom.

Eighth point.

My mind is now resting on a Thymine of a DNA strand, comparing the long molecule to History. Perhaps they are nearly one and the same, both being the basis of life. Without time and History life could not exist – the directions on a DNA strand are history themselves, having evolved over a long period of time, like the colonists' protests evolved into their first asking and eventually acquiring independence from Britain. Life could not be recorded without time, because an event in life, say mitosis, happens during a specific moment in the life of a cell (moment equals time). And the recording of events at specific points in time make up history, like an infinite amount of points would make up a line segment on a graph.

But, returning to comparison of genetic information to History, DNA and History have the repeating pattern - DNA uses the four repeating nucleotides as the pattern, while History uses the repeating events as the basis on which it is built. This pattern could also be applied to the other two common cellular constituents – RNA (four nucleotides), and proteins (made from a combination of 20 different amino acids). Both deoxyribonucleic acid and History put the repeating patterns into different sequences to get different outcomes – AGCCTATCTG vs. ATTAGCCTTA. But DNA is not just made of patterns – there are also changes, or mutations.

Twentieth point.

My mind skips further down the graphed line, approaching the next point on the line: people tend to think of life as a range of things that are good, evil, and all the shades of gray in between, and tend to portray evil as the enemy of good. However, life has yet another main struggle, between the ever - changing and the ever - constant. All history is a long tale, in which the characters (Britain, and the colonists being a couple of them), and settings (Boston Harbor being one of them) change over time, during which all the characters are doing both good and bad things. An example would be the colonists: they stand up for their rights, which is good, but they tortured the tax collectors into hiding, which is not such a good thing.

To make the following point clear, let's imagine drawing a three – dimensional sphere, in cross – hatching, using only the light and dark of the pencil. Of course, there is the typical fight between the dark and the light values, but there is another factor. The length of the lines used is very important, because if there was no end to the line used to draw the shadow, the line would extend across the whole drawing, leaving no possibility for a highlight in the drawing, where the light hits the object being drawn. The same happens if the line had no length, because then it is impossible to draw a shadow on an object without putting down a line or a dot (which is basically a plain made up of an infinite amount of lines running in every which direction) on the paper.

So, the drawing is not only a contest between the lightness and darkness of the line, but also of the size of these lines. The same way, life is also a contest of not only good and evil, but also of the ever – changing versus the ever – constant.

Twenty eighth point.

My train of thought now makes me see an imaginary fight. Two little boys are fighting over a cookie in a kindergarten. One boy, with light brown hair, frowns, and punches the other in the stomach. The second boy, with blond hair and brown eyes, starts wailing, as the first one eats the cookie, victorious. The teacher steps in, but the fight has already come to an end, so the teacher comforts one of the boys, and calls the parents of the other, the one that ate the cookie. A fight eventually comes to an end, but the battles between the ever – changing and the - ever constant, and one of the evil vs. the good, never do. Therefore it is unreasonable to call them fights. Also, I realize, without the good there can be no evil, as without the cold of the winter, it is impossible to appreciate the warmth of the summer, because there is nothing to compare the summer to (let spring and fall be transitions between the summer and winter).

It is easier to see these "battles" as actually being balances of the other, working together to help shape the world through the contrasts of each other – good and evil, change and constancy, working together to create the image of the sphere with the gray pencil on the white piece of paper.

The line of the mental graph has a positive slope, but it starts on the negatives side of the x – axis. The points on the negatives side of the x – axis represent the past, the Y – intercept stands for the present, and the yet unmapped points on the positives side of the x – axis represent the future. My mind thinks of a few more points, then, tired, hits the Y – intercept, returning back to me. I notice that I stopped flipping back and forth the pile of Post – its, and I think of how far my mind wandered away from them. I now proceed to look at the homework pile, still not completed, and sigh. I guess I better get started before my parents yell at me.

One mystery keeps nagging me: what was I thinking of, all this time? I totally forgot what I was thinking of. Probably thinking of the mysteries of the universe, but definitely not of my Algebra 2 homework.

Sigh.

Graph by hand to solve the system.

34.2X –7.6Y=123.44

Y=134.8X-12.57^2


End file.
